This talk explores the theme of right view or right understanding through a teaching found in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (MN 43). This sutta lists five factors that assist the development of right understanding when liberation is the aim and fruit of the path. These five supportive conditions include virtue / morality, wide learning / reflection, discussion of what was learned, tranquility / calmness, and insight. The talk considers each of these factors in turn.

The Buddha's teaching on Papancha - the proliferating tendency of mind - obscures a natural freedom and peace. This talk explores how proliferation happens conditioned by desire, aversion, views and the sense of personal identity and how awareness is key in understanding this pattern and freeing it.

This evening’s talk will address the overlap between psychotherapy and meditation, from the perspective of a Western psychiatrist whose introduction to the study of the mind came through Buddhist meditation. Discussion will center on how primal emotions like aggression and desire are handled. While it is often assumed that Buddhism counsels suppression or eradication of such energies, Mark Epstein will propose another model. Drawn from his studies of both D.W. Winnicott and the Buddha, this evening’s presentation will use the Buddha’s own inner struggle as a model for our own. Meditation instruction will be offered.
Mark Epstein is a Harvard trained psychiatrist with a private practice in New York City. A longtime student of Joseph Golstein and Jack Kornfield, he is the author of a number of works about the overlap of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Thoughts without a Thinker, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, and Psychotherapy without the Self.